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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23634988">or implode</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandyk/pseuds/sandyk'>sandyk</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>with the sun in my eyes Surprise! [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Child Death, F/M, Pepperony - Freeform, first in series, it will get better, unhappy ending but</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 19:27:15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,001</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23634988</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandyk/pseuds/sandyk</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark went to rehab in late 2000 and came back different. As his new PA Pepper Potts is about to discover.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Pepper Potts/Tony Stark</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>with the sun in my eyes Surprise! [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1701469</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Trope Bingo: Round Fourteen</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>or implode</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>For the trope bingo square first time/last time. Not mine, no profit garnered. Title from the Cardigans's Explode or Implode.  Thanks A!!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The first time, Pepper was exasperated as she pulled into the driveway of Tony's stupid mansion. She'd been working for Tony for four months and she was so close to being done with it all. She genuinely liked working for Stark Industries, she actually liked Tony, she liked the other executive PAs and she even liked Obadiah. (She never suspected. None of them did. She wasn't suspicious, he didn't drop hints that looking back she could say it was so obvious. They all liked him. Rhodey, Tony, Pepper. The only one of them who didn't like Obie was Happy and that wasn't because Happy had good sense or was perceptive, he just thought Obie was a stuck up jerk. He'd met too many dickheads like Obie back when he was boxing.) </p>
<p>But since she had started working for Tony directly he'd been so hard to keep track of. It wasn't the distractions she'd thought she'd have to deal with. He wasn't traveling. He wasn't dating a parade of beautiful women and occasional gorgeous men. As far as she could tell, he wasn't drinking or taking drugs. He just spent a lot of time at his house. He wouldn't let anyone visit. When he was in the office, he was generally very productive. Then he would disappear to his mansion and be practically unreachable. He wouldn't even let Obie see what he was working on. </p>
<p>Pepper knew how to do her job. She was young, she thought she knew everything. She had convinced herself she just had to smile, stay calm, make her bosses think she agreed with them, smile, play dumb when needed. So far this wasn't exactly working with Tony, but it was mostly working. She thought he liked her. </p>
<p>When she tried to push a little with Tony, he had responded with his own blank smile. Maybe all the rumors were true, he had changed. Back when she'd started as part of the admin back up for Tony's then personal PA, two of the other ladies sang R - E - H - A - B to the tune of Respect as they processed bills. Apparently Tony had spent over four months at a place in Switzerland. So it was good, it was a good change that he wasn't drinking or taking drugs. At least not in the way he used to.</p>
<p>But he was always at his mansion. She had so many very important items she needed him to sign off on and he stopped answering his phone for hours at a time. He didn't respond to emails or texts. He would just ignore them for hours at a time and then pop up at two a.m. with a flurry of responses. </p>
<p>She gritted her teeth and got out of her car. She knocked on the door. A voice came from the house, vaguely British, saying, "Miss Potts, if you need something signed, you can leave it at the door and I will make sure Mister Stark has it to you tomorrow."</p>
<p>"Wonderful, but I need to actually talk to him. We have government contracts and they mostly don't care about Tony Stark's timeouts," she said. The voice, she thought, was the mansion's computer butler. The other PAs had talked about it. </p>
<p>There was silence. Then the door opened and the computer butler said that Tony was in the living room, straight ahead and down the steps.</p>
<p>He was in the living room. He was sitting on a blanket with a baby. A baby doing tummy time, if Pepper remembered her babysitting correctly. She said, "Hello?"</p>
<p>"Pepper Potts will not give up," Tony said. "If you tell anyone about this I will sue your ass into the ground. And I do mean anyone, including your favorite cousin Rachel."</p>
<p>"You did your research," Pepper said. "You have a child."</p>
<p>"How do you know he's my kid?" Tony lifted up the boy and rubbed his back. </p>
<p>"Do you threaten people when you're just babysitting?"</p>
<p>"Smart girl," Tony said. </p>
<p>The baby boy wiggled in Tony's arms, and turned his face towards her. He was an adorable baby. </p>
<p>The baby's name was Howard Jarvis Stark. Tony always called him "Danny." Tony said, "When people find out he exists, they'll yell out hey, Howie or whatever junk they decide his name should be, but they won't get it right. It's a little gift I can give him." </p>
<p>Pepper got her papers signed. She was at Tony's mansion constantly after that. So constantly, Tony trusted Pepper to watch Danny when Tony had to leave town. When Danny started talking, when he was barely a year old and he talked in sentences, Danny always called Pepper "Mom." She assumed because Pepper was the only woman he saw besides his pediatrician. Pepper gave more hugs than the pediatrician.  </p>
<p>At that point, when Danny was talking, their largely undefined relationship as friends, employer/employee relationship, it didn't freak out Tony or even Pepper. It seemed ridiculous to say Pepper fell maternally in love with a baby but it was how she felt. </p>
<p>Even when Danny's world expanded, after Obie knew (He never once gave them a reason to think that he didn't like Danny, or he didn't want Danny safe), Tony decided Danny needed some socializing. He went to a fancy, gated preschool where he was registered as Howie Daniel Potts once or twice a week. Danny didn't really notice his multiple names. He answered to Danny. </p>
<p>The computer butler evolved, too. Like the rest of them, JARVIS seemed to grow in love with Danny. </p>
<p>The boy's mother was a "spitfire" Tony met in rehab. A brilliant and admired painter who loved heroin so very very much is how Tony described her. "'Heroin,' she'd say, even in group she was just so into heroin. No downsides." She was sober when she met Tony and when they started sleeping together. She was so focused on staying sober she didn't even realize she was pregnant until her fourth month or so. Then she came to Tony and lived in his mansion and held on until she gave birth to Danny. She turned him over to Tony and went away. She overdosed and died two months later. </p>
<p>The start of Tony's art collection was Pepper buying all of Danny's mother's art.  </p>
<p>Pepper questioned herself every day. She used to plan on having a real life with a person, some person shaped tidy blob that was somehow funny and charming and supported her work and would function as a parent if Pepper ever had kids with the blob. Baby blobs, she thought, at four a.m., and she'd been up twenty two hours between Danny's ear infection, Tony's alternating panic at Danny's ear infection and feverish work in the lab on a smart crop, and Pepper's actual work basically running a third of Stark Industries. She used to plan on baby blobs. </p>
<p>Danny's mother had two cousins who were more into speed than heroin and at some point they needed money so they found him and took him from his preschool and drove east from Malibu to find a way to get money from Tony but everything went wrong. The FBI agent stood in the living room while Tony and Pepper were on the couch. FBI said both men were dead. Shot by the cops. The car had so much blood in it. "From your son," the FBI agent. </p>
<p>So they didn't have a body. They knew Danny was dead but they didn't have anything to bury. </p>
<p>The funny part was that the story still didn't get out. (Not for years and years until fucking Captain America decided to release the SHIELD records. And Tony forgave Cap instantly and Natasha and all of them but Pepper hated them for it. Even with warning, even with Fury calling from a helicopter ten minutes after the records went live, JARVIS could only scrub so much. It was such a juicy story, too. Nothing too complex like contemplating HYDRA warping SHIELD intelligence and what that did to the world. It was just a juicy true crime story about the very very famous Tony Stark and his dead child.)</p>
<p>(The assholes would call out to Tony to provoke a response and ask him about his son Howard and Tony would look over at her, like, told you so.)</p>
<p>Tony relapsed again. Everyone let it pass for months, like, who were they to argue with Tony drinking again? Except he was drinking himself to death and the board was all over them to do something. Pepper sat on the edge of his bed and looked at the Basquiat painting Tony had in his bedroom. She said, "You should probably stay alive."</p>
<p>"Rousing speech," Tony said. He'd already agreed to rehab. He was going in the morning. He wanted to appease the board. Tony said, "If I believed in God and heaven, I would have some reason to die, you know. See my boy again. But you die, you're gone, you're dust. So you're right, probably stay alive."</p>
<p>She nearly laughed. They were both pathetic. People kept living after their children were gone all the time. She literally couldn't conceive of how they did it or even got out of bed, but she'd been doing it for five whole months. Danny was only mostly her child. He was just, he had been hers.</p>
<p>Tony said, "We could do something about all this sexual tension, if you wanted. If you need something to do?"</p>
<p>She did laugh at that. But they had great sex. They did it again when he came back from rehab. By then she had acquired a psychiatrist and she was really much better. Better enough. They kept acting like they were together. That was how she framed it in her head. </p>
<p>Right before Tony left for Afghanistan, he said to her as they were laying in his bed, both barely awake, "I love you. I do love you. We should get married."</p>
<p>"This is so romantic, just how every little girl pictures it," she said. </p>
<p>He was kidnapped. Missing. He came back different. Good different. He was going to stop making weapons. He was going to do something good. She could throw herself into that. </p>
<p>They did get married, quietly, just Jim and Happy there. </p>
<p>Tony told her the minute he realized what the palladium was doing. "Oh, no, fuck that," she said. "We're fixing this, do you hear me?"</p>
<p>Three days after the Expo she checked herself into one of those very discreet places the uber wealthy had access to. She wasn't an addict. She was just falling apart in a number of ways. Tony was very supportive and there was a day she walked out into the Montana sun and squinted at how bright it was and she felt real again. She felt like a person who was alive for the first time since the FBI agent said "From your son." </p>
<p>The last time she saw Danny, he was four and three quarters. He proudly announced his age when she made him breakfast because he had calculated it. He was a scary smart child, just like Tony had been. Danny didn't design a circuit board at age four. He played the piano and read books written for ten year olds. </p>
<p>She drove him to his preschool. She and Tony had been debating what to do about actual school. Danny was too smart for typical kindergarten and Tony hated the idea of homeschooling. They were putting it all off. She got to the school and got Danny out of his car seat. He said, "Can I put a braid in your hair?"</p>
<p>"Sure," she said. She had nowhere important to be. Danny loved to braid hair and only Pepper had enough for it to be fun for him. When he was done and the little black hair tie was tight at the end, Danny hugged her and she held his hand as they walked into school.</p>
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